Hack Education

Google+ is finally open to teenagers, according to post today by VP of Product Bradley Horowitz. When G+ launched last year, it was only open to those 18 and older, and even when the social network expanded to Google Apps for Education users, it maintained the age restriction. With today's...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. You can listen to last week's episode (in which we discuss our thoughts on the anti-SOPA protests, the library...

On stage at FETC today, Google announced that "hundreds of schools in 41 states" have adopted Chromebooks in one or more classrooms, and some 27,000 students in 3 states -- Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina -- will soon go 1-to-1 with the devices. Just one week go, Apple took the...

At the 10 year anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare last spring, the university and the larger opencourseware movement had a lot to say about what was next for the open education initiative. Over 100 million people had already accessed the content that the university had made freely and openly available, true,...

Over on MindShift today, I have a look at Alumn.us, a startup that describes itself as "an online engagement platform for under-served schools, we empower kids to make changes to their schools, and give alumni, parents, and other community members the tools to support them." This isn't Classmates v2.0. It's...

It's news that shouldn't surprise anyone that read the fine print on the registration for Stanford's Artificial Intelligence class offered last fall: Professor Stanford Thrun has announced he is resigning from the university to launch an online learning startup. Unlike the Machine Learning and Database classes -- the other two...

Politics and Policies It was an interesting week for the Internet, with online protests held on January 18 to challenge and draw awareness to SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), two proposed pieces of legislation that would severely impact both the infrastructure of the Internet and...

Last month, I chose Desmos as one of my picks for best new education startups of 2011, in no small part because of the company's mission to create educational software so that interactive content is Web-based and works across multiple devices and platforms. In light of my recent screed about...

Last year, Google decided to shutter Google Labs, a place where a number of incredibly wonderful experimental projects lived.  Among the projects that got the ax was one of my favorites:  Google's Android App Inventor.   Sure, The New York Times' David Pogue gave it one of his most scathing...

iTunes U has long been one of the hidden gems of the iTunes Store, and even with some new features announced yesterday to the online learning platform, it appears that it's again set to be overshadowed. That's hardly surprising -- the news about digital textbooks and their "reinvention" was the focus...